BATTLES OF LEGEND: TERMINAL REVENGE Made One Really Poor Decision
Roughly one week ago, Konami launched Battles of Legend: Terminal Revenge for the Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG. This set was designed to revive strategies from the old Duel Terminal series such as Genex, Infernoids, Ritual Beasts, and even Ice Barrier.
Heck, many of the new cards even make Ice Barrier a potential “Rogue Tier” deck. Just the thought of that is crazy to me. Of course, the two cards that really got the attention of the community are Phantom of Yubel and Dragon Master Magia (more on him later).
In addition, a fair number of reprints made their way into Terminal Revenge. Notable ones include The Legendary Exodia Incarnate and Sengenjin which make sense with The Infinite Forbidden releasing next month, Substitoad and Snatch Steal are just classic cards, Diviner of the Herald, Aromaseraphy Jasmine, plenty of Branded cards got reprints including Branded Fusion, and a lot of (if not all of) the Spright cards which is a decent strategy.
There were also some really odd inclusions like Barox, Skelgon, and The End of Anubis. I’m extremely confused about these inclusions honestly. If I’m honest, the high-end reprints probably should have been included in Rarity Collection 2.
I do also wish that the five pieces of Exodia had been included for the hype of The Infinite Forbidden. I know they were included in Legendary Decks II which was reprinted this year, but The Legendary Exodia Incarnate was also included in those decks and it still saw a reprint here.
I want to address the biggest problem with Terminal Revenge: Dragon Master Magia. Konami made a very anti-consumer decision when they decided that this card would only be available as a Quarter Century Secret Rare.
As of writing this article, the price on TCGPlayer.com is $610 plus $0.99 shipping. This is nuts! The card isn’t meta warping. It’s a card geared towards nostalgic players and collectors who like Blue-Eyes decks and it is one of the most expensive cards in the game at the moment.
The difference is that all of the other cards except for Ten Thousand Dragon are just specific rarities or a misprint. I know a ton of people are pissed about the paywall this card is behind just so that Konami could ensure that the set would sell more than a few cases.
Unfortunately, this really hurts player trust and confidence which appears to already be strained at the moment.
Outside of the Dragon Master Magia debacle, there are two new alternate arts for Sky Striker Ace - Raye and Sky Striker Ace - Roze locked in the Quarter Century Secret Rare.
I’m not as mad about these as they are alternate artworks and not brand new cards locked behind an artificially high rarity. However, I do think they should’ve been available in other rarities like Secret Rare.
Maybe it’s because of the current state of the game being Snake Eye or bust, but at the end of the day, Terminal Revenge is a pretty mid set to be honest.
It has tons of cards for specific archetypes, but the archetypes aren’t the most exciting in my opinion and the rarity distribution makes it hard to easily get the cards you need.
That said, if your Official Tournament Store (or Konami) wanted, they could host an event focused on these archetypes and it would probably be a fun event.
There are fun (and very weird) reprints included that definitely help buoy the set up (thank you for finally reprinting Aromaseraphy Jasmine, now can we please get a Snowdrop the Rikka Fairy reprint?).
Konami was kind enough to send me a box of Terminal Revenge and you can check out my pulls down below. I’ll admit that my pulls were not great (spoiler warning), but I was glad to get more copies of Branded Fusion and a few other cards.
Let me know in the comments if you think I’m being a bit harsh on the set and what your favorite cards from it are.
